The services provided by the centre to achieve its objectives and satisfy the needs of enterprises can be divided into two main groups:

•    Technology Transfer Office (TTO) services.
•    Technical area services.

SERVICES PROVIDED BY CITIC'S TTO

CITIC'S Technology Transfer Office (TTO) is defined as an interface entity between the Technology Centre, the university community and the business sector, the main purpose of which is to foster relations between the three entities, promoting the transfer of the university's scientific-technical output and that of the Technology Centre itself to the production sector. 
The activities carried out within the framework of CITIC's TTO are:

1.    Proposal and incentive management service. R&D programmes.

The projects offices prepare and process R&D project proposals designed to obtain joint financing. The National Projects Office deals with regional and national, public and private enterprise programmes, whilst the European Projects Office deals with European public programmes. Additionally, these offices also seek out partners, both at national and international level, as well as generating the final consortia for the R&D projects.

The functions of the National Projects Office are:

•    Searching for financing sources.
•    Consultancy services for the preparation and drafting of R&D proposal projects designed to obtain joint financing for regional and national, public and private enterprise programmes.
•    Searching for partners at national level.
•    Representation in national institutions.
•    Promotion of technology transfer and joint project agreements between enterprises and universities.
•    Providing easy access to information on the tax benefits of investment in R&D.

The European Projects Office deals with:

•    Generation of consortia. Identification of viable entities for future projects.
•    Representation in international institutions.
•    Management of the technical and administrative aspects of proposals.
•    Monitoring of proposals issued.
•    Attending European project informative / training symposiums.
•    Consultancy for Andalusian entities interested in participating in European projects.


2.    PIDI Network

CITIC forms part of the Research, Development and Innovation Information Points Network (Red de Puntos de Información sobre actividades de Investigación, Desarrollo e innovación, Red PI+D+i).
This information point provides enterprises and entrepreneurs with a personalised information and consultancy service regarding the financing instruments that best suit their needs and projects, always in relation to research, development and innovation activities. Furthermore, they can also receive information on the public R&D support lines for the different administrative areas: local, regional, national or European programmes, as well as the different areas of innovation.

3.    Liaison service as regards the technological offer and demand among ICT enterprises

As a technology transfer promotional entity, CITIC provides a service that links up technology offer and demand.
Through a web form (www.citic.es) or via direct contact with CITIC, enterprises can request help for a specific technology that they need to improve in their internal processes, products, or for the purpose of tackling new products, etc. Likewise, those enterprises with reliable knowledge and demonstrable experience in the area of a specific technology can offer their know-how through CITIC. CITIC's work consists in pairing up offer and demand and establishing the appropriate framework by way of advice and monitoring so that the collaboration and technology transfer agreements are carried out in a satisfactory manner for the parties concerned.

4.    Information service

The Technological Monitoring services are essential for the development of innovative projects. CITIC supplies the following services in this area:
•    Technology state of the art and technical studies.
•    Promotion and dissemination of the scientific research offer.
•    Creation of technological services portfolios and study proposals.
•    Fostering relations between enterprises, by pairing up technological offer and demand and the creation of an ICT enterprises directory.

On the other hand, the Dissemination and Disclosure services, with technological demonstrators and specialised training to ensure the appropriate technology transfer constitute a key stage of technological development. In this respect, CITIC provides enterprises with the following services:

•    Definitions, design and development of its own technological demonstrators as well as others for CITIC's board member entities.
•    Control, management and operation of technological demonstrators.
•    Organisation and control of demonstrations for personal visits.
•    Definition and design of specific training activities.
•    Studies and reports on demand.

5.    Consultancy

CITIC (Centro Tecnológico TIC) is an entity that has a sufficiently large knowledge base to provide advice and support to the administration and other entities in the definition, synthesis and development of projects associated with the Information and Communication Technologies, as well as with the development and implementation of the Information Society. Additionally, the figure of technological consultant focalises the support, management, co-ordination and monitoring of the defined project jointly with the administrations.
The services that comprise the ICT-IS and Innovation Consultancy are:
•    Business consultancy oriented towards improving enterprise competitiveness, strategic development, and change implementation and management planning; preparation of company strategy and plans for innovation and improvement.
•    Process consultancy as regards process redesign and optimisation, as well as in the design of work flows.
•    Technical consultancy for aligning business processes with the work flow architectures and ICT solutions.
•    IS consultancy. Definition and implementation of Information Society promotion and development projects.
•    Projects consultancy. Definition of technical proposals for research and development projects.
•    Innovation diagnostics: commercial, organisational and technological.

CITIC TECHNICAL AREA SERVICES

CITIC's technical department focuses its attention on large national and international projects. This experience allows CITIC to provide enterprises with high quality innovative technological products and services, as well as knowledge regarding non-mature emerging technologies on the market.

The main technological areas in which CITIC carries out innovative product development are:

• Interactive digital terrestrial television.
• Information systems security and trust.
• Telemedicine, teleassistance and communications.
• Software and computing models.

The following sections describe the main products and services currently offered by CITIC's technical department.

1.    Technical support services in project development

Due to their knowledge of the most innovative technologies, as well as of those most extensively used, CITIC's researchers form a team fully competent to provide support in any project.
If an enterprise has a idea for a project, but it lacks the necessary human resources or technology, it can request technical assistance from CITIC, which can provide the enterprise with advice and offer the best solution to suit its needs, either by way of direct subcontracting of a part of the project, outsourcing to professionals that work directly under the supervision of the enterprise in question or by means of any other type of collaboration that guarantees the success of the project.

2.    Services related to interactive Digital Terrestrial Television (iDTT)

Interactive digital terrestrial television and its associated services constitute one of CITIC's strategic lines of research.

As a result of projects carried out in the field of iDTT, CITIC has a standard set of broadcast ready applications associated to a television programme. The content of these applications are automatically updated from web sources and are distributed through content feeds. These services include: news, sports, duty chemists, weather forecasts, programme guides, telephones and general services, traffic updates, and interactive games.

Furthermore, CITIC's extensive experience in the development of these types of interactive services enables it to offer interactive application development and maintenance adapted to the client's needs.

Likewise, the broad experience acquired by CITIC in digital television interactivity opens up new possibilities as regards providing services with true interactivity via the TV.

Additionally, and thanks to its extensive knowledge of equipment for generating carrousels, CITIC offers management and maintenance of the interactive content of the carrousels generator included within the iDTT broadcasting channel.
In order to cater for society and industry demands, CITIC is working on integration in other areas of digital television, such as IP Television or Mobile Television.

3.    Technological consultancy and support. Know-how at the service of enterprises

CITIC's multidisciplinary team is capable of providing high level consultancy and research, specialised in diverse technologies within each of CITIC's areas of development:

•    Mobile and wireless communications. One of the main areas of research and development promoted within CITIC is centred on communications applied to medicine, due to its clear benefits in terms of increased efficiency, quality and streamlining of the services offered, as well as savings in costs and time, with the consequent increase in patients' satisfaction levels.

CITIC's know-how encompasses implementation of SDL with UMTS protocol layers for 3G mobile communications; device interconnection with GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Bluetooth, ZigBee, WLAN, and RFID protocols; patient identification via RFID. Furthermore, a Wireless Technology Interoperability and Demonstration Centre has been developed (C2ID project) where enterprises can see the latest innovations on the market and test the equipments' interoperability.

•    Sensors. Network of medical sensors with GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Bluetooth, ZigBee, WLAN, and RFID protocols; fall detection systems based on accelerometer sensors; development of prototype hardware.

•    Medical standards. Medical standard projects and use for e-health, teleassistance and telemedicine: interconnection with DICOM certificated PET and CAT systems; image treatment in DICOM format; interconnection of HL7 v2/v3 compatible systems and development of the standard messages.

•    Collaboration work and teletraining platforms. Development of collaboration web spaces based on Zope, Plone, Dotproject, Mambo/Joomla; development of platforms for teletraining with Moodle.

•    Specialised IT applications. Reading and treatment of medical imaging; patient record management and clinical record input; API connection to data sources.

•    Web environment applications. Healthcare applications in the web environment (J2EE, Struts, Hibernate, Web services); portals; collaboration spaces; business management applications.

•    Distributed computing and high availability systems. Development of applications for OpenMosix clusters; optimisation of Sun Grid Engine for Linux low memory nodes; study of the use of distributed files systems for grid construction; implementation of grid integrated algorithms applied to biocomputing under GPU.

Architectures based on grid-computing, cloud-computing and virtualisation.

These works and research are directly applicable in the business and scientific environments, greatly optimising the resources necessary in organisations and increasing the efficiency with which they are used.

•    Information systems. Network and server management; database management; CMS (Content Management System) and CRM (Client Relationship Management).

•    Interactive digital terrestrial television (iDTT). CITIC has a multidisciplinary team with more than 20 members who take an active part in the development of the different projects currently underway. CITIC's objectives for the future in the area of DTT include the study, incorporation and integration of new Internet and mobile television models, using: DVB-T technology; DVB-T stream analysis (free software); MHP technology; iDTT receiver simulation and return channel studies.

•    Digital audio-visual processing: CITIC has personnel that carry out teaching activities in the university environment in this field. They have formed working groups comprised of engineers with significant experience in processing audio-visual signals (editing, storage, capture, format conversion, etc.) in the main audio-visual formats (MPEG I and II, DV, Windows Media, etc.), as well as the treatment (channel equalisation, audio-visual effects, etc.) and streaming of these signals.

•    Adaptation of ICTs to electrical distribution networks. Automation of transformer stations and transformation centres; distribution network telemanagement; electrical network node telemonitoring via PLC (Power Lines Communications) technology; communications via the electrical system using BPL (Broadband over Power Lines Communications) technology; establishment of SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems via sensorial networks.

•    Software engineering: For the Free Software community, apart from specific developments with different technologies, CITIC is a member of the AEN CTN71/GT22 "Interoperability with Open Software" national committee.

•    Natural language processing: CITIC's work in this area is focussed on enabling extraction of web knowledge without the user's intervention, in a semi-automatic or automatic manner, and on natural language processing for data mining, text mining, opinion mining, perceptions analysis, market studies, etc.

Apart from the aforementioned, any technology within the field of information and communications may be researched by the CITIC team meaning that any enterprise that needs more in-depth information on a little-known technology can contact CITIC to request its research services.